We Think Northern Dynasty Minerals (TSE:NDM) Needs To Drive Business Growth Carefully

We can readily understand why investors are attracted to unprofitable companies. For example, although software-as-a-service business Salesforce.com lost money for years while it grew recurring revenue, if you held shares since 2005, you'd have done very well indeed. But while the successes are well known, investors should not ignore the very many unprofitable companies that simply burn through all their cash and collapse.

So, the natural question for Northern Dynasty Minerals (TSE:NDM) shareholders is whether they should be concerned by its rate of cash burn. In this article, we define cash burn as its annual (negative) free cash flow, which is the amount of money a company spends each year to fund its growth. We'll start by comparing its cash burn with its cash reserves in order to calculate its cash runway.

Check out our latest analysis for Northern Dynasty Minerals

When Might Northern Dynasty Minerals Run Out Of Money?

You can calculate a company's cash runway by dividing the amount of cash it has by the rate at which it is spending that cash. When Northern Dynasty Minerals last reported its balance sheet in March 2021, it had zero debt and cash worth CA$38m. Importantly, its cash burn was CA$54m over the trailing twelve months. That means it had a cash runway of around 8 months as of March 2021. To be frank, this kind of short runway puts us on edge, as it indicates the company must reduce its cash burn significantly, or else raise cash imminently. The image below shows how its cash balance has been changing over the last few years.

How Is Northern Dynasty Minerals' Cash Burn Changing Over Time?

Because Northern Dynasty Minerals isn't currently generating revenue, we consider it an early-stage business. So while we can't look to sales to understand growth, we can look at how the cash burn is changing to understand how expenditure is trending over time. As it happens, the company's cash burn reduced by 15% over the last year, which suggests that management may be mindful of the risks of their depleting cash reserves. While the past is always worth studying, it is the future that matters most of all. So you might want to take a peek at how much the company is expected to grow in the next few years.

How Easily Can Northern Dynasty Minerals Raise Cash?

While Northern Dynasty Minerals is showing a solid reduction in its cash burn, it's still worth considering how easily it could raise more cash, even just to fuel faster growth. Issuing new shares, or taking on debt, are the most common ways for a listed company to raise more money for its business. Commonly, a business will sell new shares in itself to raise cash and drive growth. By comparing a company's annual cash burn to its total market capitalisation, we can estimate roughly how many shares it would have to issue in order to run the company for another year (at the same burn rate).

Northern Dynasty Minerals' cash burn of CA$54m is about 21% of its CA$258m market capitalisation. That's fairly notable cash burn, so if the company had to sell shares to cover the cost of another year's operations, shareholders would suffer some costly dilution.

Is Northern Dynasty Minerals' Cash Burn A Worry?

On this analysis of Northern Dynasty Minerals' cash burn, we think its cash burn reduction was reassuring, while its cash runway has us a bit worried. Summing up, we think the Northern Dynasty Minerals' cash burn is a risk, based on the factors we mentioned in this article. Separately, we looked at different risks affecting the company and spotted 5 warning signs for Northern Dynasty Minerals (of which 2 are a bit concerning!) you should know about.

Of course Northern Dynasty Minerals may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of companies boasting high return on equity, or this list of stocks that insiders are buying.

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This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.
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